Android Watch will also use Bluetooth to communicate with your Android Smartphone

The communication between the smartphone app and your Android watch is encrypted (AES)

Pokemon GO Plus works in the background – it is not required to keep the smartphone app opened while playing on the watch

A variety of Android Wear devices smart watches are supported – the code scans for watch characteristics and adapts accordingly

Some Android Wear devices work with iOS also. The data mined implementation suggest you’ll be able to use an Android smartwatch and pair it with iOS

Here’s the code and data mining report, in lay mans terms!

Android Wear Support

The first hint that Pokemon GO is coming to Android Wear came in the form of a newly added project inside the 0.37.0 APK file. The project is named pokemongoplus and contains the entire Android and Android Wear implementation of GO Plus platform.

GO Plus referenced in the Android version of Pokemon GO

The final confirmation was discovered inside a file called R.class. The class contains constants that are used elsewhere in the code. We found references to Android Wear, related Google and Android Wear utility services.

Background operation

We were also able to confirm that GO Plus works in the background. The BackgroundService.class file revealed the entire implementation and actions that will operate in the background. In layman terms, GO Plus can do the following while running in the background:

Track and Capture Pokemon

Retrieve one or multiple items

Notify the Android app on various errors: out of Pokeballs, inventory full, etc

Here’s the entire class signature we data mined:

GO PLUS background operations

There is a multitude of other interesting classes and methods in the new APK. We were surprised to see that the smartphone app will detect connected device’s capabilities and adjust accordingly.

The app uses a “bridge” to verify the capabilities of the connected Android Wear device. Afterwards, it configures the Characteristics using the getCharacteristicCount() method:

And yes, you read the code correctly – Niantic’s Pokemon GO Plus framework is called ble!

Encryption

We also discovered that the Bluetooth communication between the smartphone and watch is encrypted. The code is completely transparent and shows that Niantic uses AES to encrypt the communication. AES stands for Advanced Encryption Standard and it is considered safe from real time decryption. It’s widely used, secure and easy to implement. Kudos to Niantic for keeping our data safe! 🙂

Pokémon is Copyright Gamefreak, Nintendo and The Pokémon Company 2001-2016
All images and names owned and trademarked by Nintendo, Niantic, The Pokémon Company, and Gamefreak are property of their respective owners.